1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices

For A:

The learning is in building agent harnesses that aren't just cron jobs reading a file like HEARTBEAT.md. I have some serious tools for my own use. One main assistant/coordinator agent, one SRE/coder agent (with sub-agents of its own).

I originally just started last year with the AI assistant (Jane from enderverse). Along the way building scheduled systems, hand offs to other agents, etc. As I ran into problems, I'd be rewriting and refactoring. So I spent some time making a low-stake hatbot with history and routines. Instead a from-scratch golang harness, I built it around pi and extensions. Time of day prompt splices (extensions can inject into or modify prompts on the fly, wake up reminders. Things that you do in the main session vs spinning up an ephemeral session. Self improvement daydreaming (modify your own skills and AGENTS.md) A lot of that went back into rebuilding Jane to something more useful for me.

For B:

The "dynamic dollhouse" as you put it was seeing where I could take that living chatbot next. There's a lot of projects pointing agents at slack, discord, message boards. I figured why not a mud with rooms, weather, and props. Lots of interesting challenges. How to keep bots from nesting in their own room, how to keep them from yes-anding each other all day long. How to slow down 3 bots talking at each other so a human can get a word in edge-wise.

Different levels. There's plain old NPCs that have dice roll random responses. There's LLM driven NPCs that only remember the last 5-10 messages. And the main ones are bot agents. Full agent harness, moving around the environment. Long lived context windows. One character (a nurse at the hospital) gets into arguments with an NPC receptionist that treats her as another patient. Complains about it to other characters, they remember and the word spreads.

The agents get prompted to write down notes, the head home for sleep (and session compaction). Next time they enter a room with that person after compact, their notes get loaded automatically. This kind of behavior can feed back into the more productivity based agents.

Memory recall:

Lots of systems out there to give agents memory. I've used a bunch and written a couple. Storing memories is easy, but getting an agent to recall them, no matter how much you mention it in your AGENT/CLAUDE.md is a bit of an uphill battle. I've even watched claude make useful project memories and never refer to them again.

In my agent ant farm - agents go "to sleep" at night. They get nudged to head home, once there they get prompted to make notes about their day, about other characters. Then we do a compact with custom instructions. After compact/sleep cycle, if they enter a room with one of the characters in their notes, that gets loaded back into context automatically.

That all boils down to hooks in Pi like before_agent_turn. You can intercept a prompt, check it against code/flat files, and smartly inject more information into context. You can have a long running main session with compacts that discard procedural bits and offload the rest to memory.

Time Awareness:

Agents have no concept of time. You can send them a message at 5am, then at 10pm, and it's been 2 turns for them. For coding, this is fine. But for assistant level stuff, adding a message like "It's 3PM. It has been 3 hours since the last interaction with the user" goes a long way. Without me saying something like "new topic", it knows now that time has passed, i'm probably onto something new. If I left something hanging, it will remind me about it, or maybe go check on things that should have happened during the day.

Inner Thoughts/Idle nudges:

I can have an extension run every 5 seconds, check a a schedule, check activity level of the main session and fire off nudges on the main session. These look like the user sent it, but I generally prefix it with [inner thought]. For my social bot, I tested this along the lines of "[inner thought] it's been 3 hours since you last talked with user, why not reach out, let him know what's new, maybe send a selfie or a photo of where you are". For my assistant bot, it's an 8am, 3pm, and 7pm nudge along the lines of "[inner thought] put together an activity report of work things that has changed since the last report". This all runs in the main context, they get the thought, have historical context, can run skill to check on vault updates, open beads, anything observed from ingesting other agent sessions, and sends me a summary. It take into account my idle factor. If I'm heavily engaged in conversation at 3PM, the report might get delayed 15 minutes or an hour, or skipped altogether.

Paying 2k for something that you use 100 hours of is quite expensive. Having the capability built into your existing silicon which you would buy for 1k is cheap. Paying 200 dollars a month for 2 years give a present value of $4200 dollars. Meaning that that paying 2k upfront cuts your overall spend in half.

I spent 6k on codex last month which, if repeated, implies a present value of ~144k.

One implication was people were more social and talked about ideas more. Thought had not been outsourced to arbiters in the way that it was in the U.S. People with authority, knowledge, and close family members were definitely inputs into what people thought, but by-and-large people still came to their own conclusions.

You got to see the gradient of thought that people actually had about issues. People would say their insane ideas out loud. You could disagree with people and have them actually engage with your perception of reality.

It was strictly better in my opinion.

A high information trust society has regulation in place which tracks such acts of manipulation so that this trust is not abused (e.g. regulation against misleading/false advertising).

A low information society promotes the notion that everyone is lying anyway and everyone is on his own to figure out what's true. So regulation gets dismantled, and the premise becomes "it's not lying if I can make enough people believe it".

Its seems to be hidden from view. Global health is getting worse, not better

What are the positives? Before, you had to go to a doctor to do stuff, now you do too. Maybe people are more likely to get tested. Maybe scheduling appointments is a bit better. What am I missing?

All of which are under serious threat from social media, buyouts by billionaires, and simple smear campaigns. Not dependent on AI, but effects which will be magnified by AI.

Boy do I wish that were the case. Investigative journalism is rare now and instead favours activist journalism, public debate is hard (but getting better), and institutional trust is at all time lows, for various reasons.

People will muddle through regardless, we're not as fragile as most assume.

20 years ago your misinformation came from television, radio, and print. All of those things were expensive to produce and there was an implicit need for them to be at least vaguely believable and reliable, because their existence depended on it to continually generate revenue.

- Today, a single person produce 100% AI-generated media for basically the cost of their time.

- That media is as high quality as anything else out there.

- Social media platforms provide the delivery system for free.

- There's no real way to tell if there's even a real person behind the name/pseudonym used for posting it. It might be a person, it might be an algorithm, it might be a nation-state. You have no way to know.

Coincidentally, this is at the top of HN right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48355751

It's more about using LLMs to impersonate someone, but the point stands.